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26/10/2012

Mithu Sen / Michael De Lucia

Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

Mithu Sen

Devoid

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present the work of Mithu Sen on the occasion of her first solo exhibition in France.

Born in 1971 in West Bengal (India), the artist lives and works in New Delhi. She holds a BFA and an MFA from the prestigious Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, one of India’s leading art schools, followed by a year course in The Glasgow School of Art.

With her disturbing shadow theatre installation, Sen sheds light on her darkest imaginings and confronts us with her personal world: a procession of finely cut-out forms – animals, objects, bits of dismembered, disjointed bodies and nightmarish visions. As a storyteller, she confronts us with our own subconscious and takes us with a subtle dark humour on a journey of initiation into the city of Paris. By presenting us revisited pop icons of our immediate environment seen as an outsider, Mithu Sen’s installation is the critical diary of her three weeks residency in Paris.

The shadow theatre is made profane here by Mithu Sen : she manipulates the effigies in her magic artefact in order to deceive our perceptions. This doom-laden set-up brings together the Eiffel Tower as a phallic image, Mona Lisa as a migrant, and The Little Prince that seduces and fascinates the beholders, inviting them to observe the ultimate danse macabre, the better to confront him with his own chimerical obsessions.

In line with her most emblematic works, here the artist repeats a visual vocabulary characteristic of her drawings and sculptures: the eroticism of a frank femininity and the unveiling of an intimacy that makes us uncomfortable, the reactivation of inanimate objects in order to create a confusion of identity – whether sexual, emotional or geographical, and an insistence on depicting the body as an organic, material entity and on dissecting and isolating its parts as pictorial motifs, alongside to deny the notion of the body as a shape, an entity as a whole that she deconstructs. With Devoid, Mithu Sen succeeds, in a way that is new to her, in making new strides in her quest for abstraction, losing none of her droll impertinence or the insubordination of her precise line.

Produced by the darkening of the light beams of the silhouettes, the farandole of these cast shadows has only the reality that we project on it. By titling this installation Devoid, the artist is trying to make us see a bare space. “Bareness is the void,” explains the artist, “but a void after there has been a presence: a withdrawn existence.” By inviting viewers to experience the immateriality of the voids of hidden light and the fullness of projected light, Sen rules out any kind of passivity: the viewer becomes a dynamic support for disseminating these shadows, and a mobile actor of these active forces.

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Michael DeLucia

Projections

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Projections, Michael DeLucia's second solo exhibition in Paris, and the gallery's fourth collaboration with this young American artist who is renewing the genre of sculpture in the age of computers.

This new series of dynamic works - large relief panels and volumes in plywood sculpted using a computer controlled router - continues a body of works that the artist has been developing since 2010, and takes it to a new level of formal and conceptual accomplishment.

Painted wood, gouged and gradated revealing the organic voice of the material; opposed and contradicting tones and forms; their regularity broken up by the many grooves hollowed by the machine, form a "conceptual geology" which questions the capacity for incarnation of these works designed on the computer and their capacity to exist, not only on the screen, but in the physical space inhabited by the viewer.

"I wonder about the condition of sculpture in the technological age," comments DeLucia, who observes that "today we work on the computer, which is an abstract and spatially fragmented place, and 99% of people will only see the exhibition on-line." For the artist, this reign of digital reproductions has transformed the very nature of our phenomenological experience, which occurs now only through the mediation of the image. Given this permanent prism which deforms our perception of the real - in a kind of latter-day version of Plato's allegory of the cave - DeLucia creates objects whose physiological reality confronts that of the beholder, posing a "problem in space" and "testing his vision of the world."

An heir to minimal and conceptual art, DeLucia has structured his proposition around a rigorous aesthetic vocabulary, limiting his experiments to a few primary geometrical forms - sphere, pyramid, cone and plane - and a limited palette of industrial paints used by the construction industry for their visual effectiveness.

Creating a marked contrast with the natural look of the wood with black, green and blue, the artist also uses these colours to evoke the technology of imagery: X-rays, blueprints, satellite photographs, the first computer screens, electronic microscopes, etc. Inspired by the idea that images are objects abstracted by radiation, DeLucia conceives his works as spatial models of projected images, with sculptures that describe the trajectory of a light ray from its source.

By putting in place this sensorial alphabet that is as elementary as it its powerful, DeLucia is able to show the impossibility of fully apprehending this pure forms. The gap between the perfection of the 3D file and the flaws that characterise its concrete realisation is manifested in the degradation of the compressed objects on the relief panels, and at other times through the blown out areas in the very heart of the works, where representation is torn apart. Pushed to its limits by the machine, the material reveals its incapacity to embody a concept, its impotence when it comes to retracing the ray of an idea, all the way to its synthesis.

This demonstration of an expressive vulnerability in the plywood, a brutal everyday material, the choice of which brings to mind the economy of means advocated by the Arte Povera artists, stands in opposition to the super-productions of contemporary sculpture. The splinters of wood escaping from the work save it from the temptation of formal academicism by creating a hook that poetically opens the sculpture to infinite possibility.

On the borders between figuration and abstraction, painting and sculpture, the readymade and the artisanal, DeLucia's work transfigures pure geometry into vectors that one can see. Full of surprises, light and mobile, his undulating sculptures achieve a musicality recalling the joyous lyricism of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings. In the tradition of Rodin, Calder and, more recently, Fred Sandback and Urs Fischer, who play on the register of the dematerialization of artworks, with Projections DeLucia establishes his position as "the first sculptor of virtuality"*.

Michael DeLucia was born in Rochester, New York, in 1978. He lives and works in Brooklyn. After studying art at the Rhodes Island School of Design in 2001, he took a further degree in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 2004. Formerly an assistant of Jeff Koons, DeLucia produced sculptures that effect the metamorphosis of practical objects into poetic, humorous apparitions before initiating a series of works on wooden panels offer a representation in relief of compressed objects modelled on computer.

In 2008 Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Brussels gave Michael DeLucia his first solo exhibition. Since then his works have entered prestigious private collections and have been exhibited at CRAC Alsace, at the Sculpture Center in New York, at the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit.

Opening: 27 October, 17-21

Galerie Nathalie Obadia
3 rue du Cloitre Saint-Merri, Paris
Hours: Monday - Saturday 11 am - 7 pm
Free Admission

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